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Friday, December 16, 2016

53 Years A Colony

Every nation has its foundation
myths. The Koreans, for example, have Tan'gun, the scion of a son of the gods
and a bear-turned-into-woman who became the first human king of the people of
the peninsula. Kenyans are not to be left out. Whenever national holidays roll
around, the air is always thick with talk of forefathers and tales of the
dreams that supposedly drove them to found the nation. Believing it has always
required a little suspension of disbelief.

This past week was no
different. President Uhuru Kenyatta used his Jamhuri day address to remind us
about “the unity our fathers believed in, and enjoyed, unity without which they
would not have won the independence war.” Never mind that the Mau Mau actually lost the
“independence war” and our “fathers”, and his father particularly, were hardly
paragons of solidarity.

If we are called “to
honour the heroism of those who won our liberty” as the President asserts, we
must begin by being honest about what came before, how the past gave birth to
the present and what we must change in order to create a better future for
ourselves and for generations to come.

Being honest requires
accepting some uncomfortable truths. Our “forefathers” did not found Kenya. It
was created and built by the British. Here’s the rub. The state and its
institutions were specifically designed to oppress and to extract from the
local population and to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an elite
few.

The Mau Mau uprising
was the culmination of resistance against this system that dates back to the
dawn of colonialism. It is this system the many who went to the forest to
fight, and the many who helped them, were committed to overthrowing. However,
and this is a second uncomfortable truth, they lost. And though their efforts
did expedite the grant of independence, it was not they who would inherit the
state. Rather, it was handed over to a new, black elite that had little
interest in reforming it.

"Will the elite
which has inherited power from the colonialists use that power to bring about
the necessary social and economic changes or will they succumb to the lure of
wealth, comfort and status and thereby become part of the Old
Establishment," future President Mwai Kibaki asked in 1964. In fact, as
the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission confirmed, the
"Old Establishment" was never overthrown and the colonial state
endured.

So a third
uncomfortable truth is that independence did not translate to liberty.
President Kenyatta was lying when he spoke of “first age of heores” who “joined
hands to overthrow the colonial order.” The oppressive colonial state persists
to this day and has subverted almost every sincere effort to reform it. The
first attempt was via the 1962 Constitution. A paper written 30 years later by
the current Attorney-General spoke of a “misguided attempt to harmonise the
operations of a democratic constitution with an undemocratic and authoritarian
administrative structure. Unhappily instead of the latter being amended to fit
the former, the former was altered to fit the latter with the result that the
constitution was effectively downgraded."

After decades of
struggle, six years ago we embarked on yet another attempt to reform the
state. And, perhaps predictably, the
heirs of the “Old Establishment” are again at work trying to do to the 2010
constitution what their fathers did to its predecessor. They have maintained
the authoritarian structures, such as the provincial administration, and
introduced laws meant to curtail constitutional rights and have consistently
operated in ways that either disregard the document or actively undermine it.

Being honest about our
past will allow us to appreciate that the struggle against subjugation that begun in the last decade of the 19th century continues to this
day. It will open our eyes to the fact
that while our oppressors may have changed color, their methods and aims remain
largely the same. It will also allow us to choose which of our “fathers” we
wish to emulate. Those who stood up for the rights of the people, or those who
became part of the Old Establishment? On that choice, our future will hang.